Kerala - Kochi   

‘Muziris project to boost tourism’

KOCHI: The proposed Muziris heritage-conservation-cum-tourism project will boost Kerala’s tourism potential, says E.M. Najeeb, president of the Confederation of Kerala Tourism Industry.

Mr. Najeeb predicts that Muziris, when fully developed, will attract at least 20 per cent more tourists to Kerala. He notes that the Union Ministry of Tourism expects some 10 million foreign tourists to visit India in 2010 and some 500 million domestic tourists will go around the country. The Muziris project has the potential to attract a chunk of these visitors to Kerala, he says.

He points out that all these years, Kerala has been exploiting its natural and cultural resources for tourism promotion. However, the backwaters-beaches-ayurveda alone cannot sustain Kerala’s attraction for long. Kerala emerged as a major tourism destination when Kashmir went down because of the long years of violence and unrest there. But, now Kashmir is slowly regaining its status because of the relative calm there.

In view of these, Mr. Najeeb says, the State needs to bolster its attractiveness by introducing new tourism products. Niche areas such as history-and-heritage tourism should be opened. The State has a lot of temples, churches, mosques, forts, palaces and other historical monuments which can be made part of a history-and-heritage circuit. In fact, India as a whole is basically a cultural destination and nearly 60 per cent of the foreign tourists visit heritage sites.

Heritage tourism will be an ideal thrust area for Kerala and developing Muziris as a heritage site will be a great step forward, he says.

The Muziris Heritage Site, developed in and around Kodungalloor and North Paravur on the coast, is focussed on the archaeological excavations at Pattanam. The excavations, on for three years, look for remains of the nearly 3,000-year-old maritime civilisation that thrived around the ancient port town of Muziris, which is believed to have been destroyed by the huge floods of AD 1341 in the Periyar.

The conservation-cum-tourism project is being undertaken by the Kerala Tourism with help from a host of other agencies.

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